Habeas Corpus

Alan Bennett

24th April – 26th April

[Spring 2008]

The action takes place in the Wicksteed’s house in Hove. There, in a satirical merry-go-round, we meet a family and its friends and acquaintances for whom the determination to put sex and the satisfactions of the body (or corpus) before everything else is the ruling passion of their lives. The permissive society is taken to task in a farcical comedy in which the characters, stereotypes as their names (eg Canon Throbbing) suggest, move – and indeed dance – in and out through a maze of mistaken identities and sexual encounters. As Dr Wicksteed says at the close: “He whose lust lasts, lasts longest.”